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proof that misinformation gets out no matter how hard one fights it. My great aunt lived a long healthy life and died at age 106. She smoked 1-2 packs a day from the time she was a teenager and died of natural causes. No cancer. No diseases. And she's not an exception to the rule.

No, but this is anecdotal evidence. Notwithstanding your great aunt's experience, and that of perennial cigar smoker George Burns's, hundreds of thousands of people die each year of lung cancer, emphesyma, throat cancer, etc, who are smokers, in a way very disproportionate to non-smokers. On a similar note, there are huge numbers of anecdotal cases about drug users who don't steal, who don't harm others, and who don't mess up anyone's lives, including their own. But tobacco and alcohol are legal, and these other drugs aren't.

The exception to the rule is the small percentage of people that are harmed by comparison to the massive numbers of smokers around the world.

But even a small percentage is a lot of people when there are many millions of smokers. So my statement about more harm from tobacco compared to drug use still stands.

Sugar is a mind altering drug, let's ban it. NoT.

I don't advocate any prohibition - I don't even think tobacco should be banned. It's dangerous, and if you smoke it you might get cancer or some other lung disease. That's your choice and you are welcome to it. (Just don't make me pay for your health care.)

See there is a difference in many of these things. Too much coffee doesn't make people go rob their neighbors blind to maintain the habit. Nor does it cause people to rob banks or stick guns in the noses of gas station attendants to pay for the next dime bag.

Neither does pot ... though the prohibition might well accomplish this. People were murdered during the Prohibition, but the murder rate dropped when it was repealed. Were the deaths during the Prohibition because of alcohol, or because of the Prohibition? The fact that it dropped right after its repeal strongly implies the latter. And so it is with pot, and all the other drugs. Besides, pot is easy to grow. Why would people hold up gas stations for their next dime bag, if they could grow it without fear of being murdered by the police as in this case here? It's a weed, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to grow it.

Drugs are dangerous things.

So are guns, cars, ladders, bicycles, matches, and knives. Shall we ban them, and lock up each person in a padded cell "for their protection?" Or shall we decide to live in a free country and let people make choices, including dangerous choices, and live or die by their own decisions? I prefer the latter.

They destroy brain cells and cause what many lovingly call burnouts - people who have the thought capacity of the average butt splinter and the personality of a stunned cow - or worse.

Jackbooted SWAT thugs also destroy brain cells when they shoot people in the head - and sometimes they do this to people who weren't doing drugs at all, because they can't even write the correct number on their no-knock raid warrant. At least the druggies shoose for themselves to live as stunned cows. Those murdered by the jackbooted thugs didn't have that choice.

Drug addiction is not a little thing. Nor is it a harmless thing.

Neither is smoking, or being an alcoholic. Yet these things are legal, and drugs aren't. By the numbers the former are a lot more dangerous, so harm reduction clearly isn't the intention of the law.

And I can tell you from experience of seeing what it has done to friends and even an ex-girlfriend or two. I dated a meth addict for a while not realizing she was one at the start. It was a hidden thing. Her kids didn't have good meals and were lugged about from one home to the next for a long time before she ended up with me - all of which I found out after the fact. She sponged off of people, used and abused them and walked over anyone in her way. All her money went to meth. Her kids ate what I provided or struggled by on cheetos and cheerios when not in my company because she couldn't afford to take care of them and be high.

There are kids with this sorry fate whose parents are drinkers too, except that the children of alcoholics also tend to get beaten as well. Yet alcohol is legal and meth isn't.

Marijuana is not without it's problems either. And people who try to downplay it are liars at best. Drugs are bad news - and so are the people who take them. That's why they are illegal and should remain so.

Every argument you have made about pot can be made even more strongly about alcohol, yet the Prohibition of alcohol was a complete disaster with far-reaching negative consequences, including the establishment of the Mafia and of the Kennedy family in politics. The War on (some) Drugs is an even bigger disaster, in terms of expense, lives lost or destroyed, rights lost, and expansion of federal powers. Compared to the cost of having a few people decide they would rather be stunned cows, the drug war is incomprehensibly more destructive. And yet you support it.